Sudanese refugees find home in U.S.
by Svetlana Guineva
The Metropolitan
The rumor began to settle like a thick fog over the stuffy mud huts where homeless refugees breathed the air of uncertainty.
At first, it circulated through the cracks of dried hope formed in the wretched souls from the years of fruitless waiting for something to happen, someone to help.
Then, it slowly crept under sun-roughened black skin, under numb fingernails, under grief-stricken eyelids and shrunk with hungry entrails.
Within hours, the news was uttered by thousands of thirsty mouths, with great caution as if not to disperse in the atmosphere and never materialize.
A short time later, a wave of some divine energy melted the hearts sinking in the sound of joyful symphony, and something extraordinary happened for the first time in many years of destruction and death-people dared to imagine a better life and brighter future. America.
Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, one of the largest and the oldest in the world, harbored 85,000 people from nine countries. Most of them, though, were Sudanese.
In the civil war, which has been going on since 1956, when Sudan gained independence from Great Britain, was interrupted by only 10
ears of peace. Two million people have been killed and four million displaced, banished from their homes and land.
The Arab Muslim North has followed a systematic policy of Islamisation and Arabization of the black African Christian South, committing atrocities considered by the observers to be genocide and an ethnic cleansing.
In the process, thousands of children were left parentless, and in the exodus out of Sudan many found their deaths, unable to endure the trek of many miles to safety in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. The ones who survived-some 10,000 of them- were called the Lost Boys of Sudan, after the orphan tribe in the tale of Peter Pan.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was trying to re-unite the lost children with any known relatives, but for many of the boys and girls such didn't exist and they were either killed when their villages were attacked by the Arab militia, or displaced in a neighboring country without a trace. The UNHCR then referred about 3, 600 of the Lost Boys for adoption by the United States, and the U.S. State Department took the initiative.
The boys, who were in their teens at that time, could qualify for the resettlement only if they had arrived in Kenya between 1992 and 1994 as minors with no adult relatives.
Dusty feet barely touching the ground ran in hopeful euphoria. Hands, as if in a frantic swim, race through the human sea engulfing a bulletin board; its tiny metal legs cannot withstand the pulse of so many hearts beating as one in maddening expectation.
Eyes, strained to the very last nerve, ready to pop from inhuman exertion, race through the pages filled with names of the chosen ones.
Who will go to America?
Who will be given a second chance to start anew, to build a better life for themselves?
Simon Garang finally spotted his name on the list and saw where he was going: Denver, Colorado.
"In Kenya, I had a small radio and I knew what was happening around the world," Garang recalls. Denver had a sad fame because of the Columbine massacre and he remembered it that day. "I thought Denver was a dangerous place," he said.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service interviewed thousands of the Lost Boys in the Kakuma camp over a period of about two years.
The refugees' background was checked, their physical condition examined. They were screened for security purposes and, finally, their files were sent to New York. Different agencies around the country were responsible for the resettlement of the Sudanese boys and providing everything needed. Here in Denver, the African Community Center and the Ecumenical Refugee Services were assigned the task of helping the 61 refugees who had gradually arrived since the beginning of 2001.
The International Organization for Migration provided an orientation in the camp about what it's like in the United States, what possible cultural differences the newcomers could expect, and how to deal with them.
Most of the boys had learned about America from TV shows and Hollywood-projected images of how people lived here-that seemed to be the only perspective they had.
"When I got here, I realized that there were two Americas. One looked at from the outside and the actual one, observed from the inside," Garang said.
The outer one is synonymous with the dollar sign, a symbol of a lot of money; the inner one is of hard work and everyday problems that people have all over the world.
After the initial joy and excitement of being selected, the boys were overcome by unspeakable sadness. The vision of a new, happier life was darkened by the thought that most of their friends-people who became more than brothers in the days of horror and struggle for survival-would stay behind. No one knew when they would meet again, if ever; no one knew if the ones left would one day be as lucky to escape the monotonous life in the camp and get hold of their destiny.
Nevertheless, the chosen ones prepared quietly for the long journey, and with a fixed gaze on the horizon patiently waited for it to begin. |
